The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners

it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer desires to communicate to his fellows. He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition, the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is obviously better prose to say, ‘I was tired out,’ than to say, ‘I was wholly tired out,’ unless for any particular reason you wish to express complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say ‘the sky’ than ‘the blue sky,’ unless for any particular reason you are concerned in your description with the colour of the sky. But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and _no more_. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or statement of thesis: nothing more. Judged by such standards, the two best prose writers in English are, I think, Dean Inge and Mr. Gosse; for they, each of them, write on subjects where they have much to say, with the use of no words other than those needed for such expression, and they put those words invariably in the right order. Cecil Chesterton is dead. I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very best prose may be dull if the subject expressed is dull to the reader. You will get no better prose, for instance, than Newman’s ‘Arians of the Fourth Century.’ It is not dull to me, because I happen to be interested in that bit of history, but it would be fiercely dull to any reader who was not. Nevertheless it is first-rate prose. Newman, having to write about a particular thing upon which he had made himself immensely learned, having to tell a certain number of facts, and to express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of words in the best order—and that is prose. The very fact that any sound definition of prose involves many negative and only one positive (to wit, the positive need for lucid expression) makes it true that good prose is a common art. Excellence in prose is not common to all: far from it; but the faculties whereby excellence is reached are common to all. A man who is a first-rate walker, who carries his body with an exact poise, who can walk far without fatigue, and at a good pace, is a rare man; but we can all walk, and we all approach in various degrees the standard that man has reached. So it is with prose. Those who think that good prose must have something odd about it—a few archaic words, little eighteenth-century tricks here and there, subjunctives popped in, like currants into a cake—these resemble men who in walking every now and then in high spirits do a little dance for fun. They are free to do so; we are not displeased. We cannot help noticing them (which is, perhaps, their object), and no one is the worse for the _gambado_. But in so far as they indulge in the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too much, they are playing the fool. A wise man said to me once, ‘Don’t go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.’ Would that I had remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age. But the rhetorician wisely indulges in extravagance, and as for the poet, he may use what words he likes, and go to any extreme, or to any excess, so long only as he hits the mark. For it is with poetry as with love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of reality. It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it, or you have it not. There is no getting near poetry; and though there are degrees in it, the boundary between its being and its not being is as sharp as a razor: on the one side is It, and on the other is nothingness. By which I do not mean to say that poetry is only found in certain violent stabs of emotion such as Shakespeare and Keats can launch, for it often inhabits page upon page, as throughout (I will maintain) all the Fourth Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and countless other great achievements of the past in every tongue. But I mean that, in a long flight or a short one, immediate or continuous, poetry is poetry, and not to be mistaken for anything else. Charles Kingsley (I ought to have dragged this in at Appledore, and not have waited for Rye) said to a woman, ‘Madam, there is poetry and there is verse; and verse is divided into two kinds—good verse and bad verse. What you have here shown me is not poetry, it is verse. It is not good verse, it is bad verse.’ But, really, if I go on in this endless way of discussing the difficult trade of letters, I shall never get her nose round for the sea again. I had almost forgot I was sailing. What! Of two such occupations, the benediction of dealing with the sea and the degradation of scribbling, can you forget the better for the worse? I can. I am of a fallen race. I follow downwards. But I am aboard the Nona again, and must put her out down-channel. This will I now do, and sail out of Rye by the first of the ebb under too strong a northeast wind at two o’clock in the morning with the waning moon just rising, the sky clear, two reefs in my mainsail, the second jib, and a reef in my foresail, knowing well that I must watch all night, and that I shall get no sleep till morning. For it is one of the glories of sailing that you are under the authority of the heavens, and must submit to the whole world of water and of air, of which you are a part, not making laws to yourself capriciously, but acting as servant or brother of universal things. It would be no bad thing if some one (I am not competent) were to draw up a list of advices for the brutish man who is too poor to sail a big boat, or is not such a fool as to desire one: I mean a list of advices for a man who sails such a boat as the Nona: say, boats from seven tons to twenty. The first article in such a list would be this: _Cruising is not racing._ But on this one could write a whole volume, with digressions upon the general evils and corruptions of these our latter times when the Beast has most certainly been let loose out of the Pit, and is going about the world breathing smoke out of seven mouths, and stamping 666, with his hoof, on the foreheads of all his elect. For no one can doubt that the practice of sailing, which renews in us all the past of our blood, has been abominably corrupted by racing. I do not know whence the evil came, but I suppose it came like most evils, from a love of money. The love of money made men admire the possessors of it, and so they came to think of sailing as they do of riding horses, or of any other sport—as something to be tested by what the rich man could do. And clearly, when it came to making machines for going fast through the water by the aid of the wind alone, the rich man had his advantage. Then I suppose there came in also that craze for measurable things which has done us all so much harm in the last lifetime and a half. When I say of the Nona, ‘She is a good boat,’ when I stroke her and she purrs, there is nothing here measurable. When I say of that really abominable boat [_name censored_] (well worthy of her name)—that I had rather she had been sunk at birth than continue to sail the seas, you cannot apply a single measurable test to prove that the solid, noble Nona is good and the flimsy, whimsy [_name censored_] is bad; but in racing you can. Boat A gets in front of Boat B. Any fool can test that, and to-day was made for fools. Well, then, whatever the root of the evil, evil it is, and it has corrupted our way of living in happy little boats. Remember, and write it down: ‘_Cruising is not racing._’ If your boat is a home and a companion, and at the same time a genius that takes you from place to place and, what is much more, a good angel, revealing unexpected things, and a comforter and an introducer to the Infinite Verities,—and my boat is all these things,—then you must put away from yourself altogether the idea of racing, as much as, when you consider a wife, you must put away the intellectual woman and the waxwork girl—both of whom may have their place for all I know. The cruiser, the strong little, deep little boat, is all I have called it. It is a complete satisfaction for man; but if you let in racing you are letting in the serpent. Here you will say, ‘Have you then never raced?’ Never, sweetheart, except to get away from danger, which I loathe. I have never raced another boat in my life, although I have been on other men’s boats when they were racing, and admired their special talent, just as I would admire the talent of a man who successfully climbed the greasy pole. You must expect of your boat—your companion boat—a rational behaviour. You must say to yourself that when she is doing seven knots, she is doing well, and when she is doing nine, she is excited, and will be the better for a night’s rest. When you are on a long passage, even with steady weather, you had better bank on three to four knots and no more. For what with beating, fishing perhaps, the falling of wind, over-reefing in terror, and the rest of it, you will not do more. I have always thought to myself, knocking up and down the coasts of dear England, that if I did a hundred miles in my twenty-four hours, I was doing very well indeed. Once I spent a whole day drifting with the tide from the two Etaples Lights to the Dune, and very nearly all the way back, but even that did